Marketers Overshadowed Geeks Last Year at SXSW But Should Marry Them This Year

This SXSW coverage is brought to you by Red Square Agency. The agency that also brought you speling.

ClickZ has an interesting piece on B2B brands an SXSW. As we wrote last year, SXSW has overwhelmingly been taken over by marketers leaving the geeks to grumble about their presence. Hey, things change. Go with it. There's really nothing else you can do.

Of the presence of B2B brands at SXSW, Eloqua's Jesse Noyes told ClickZ, "Some people tend to think of 'South By' as more of a consumer-facing event where the next big thing like Twitter gets launched. But you have a lot of B2B brands setting up booths next to B2Cs. You'll go to a panel and see the head of marketing for Adobe sitting next to Pepsi on stage. That's what makes it great."

SXSW is most certainly becoming more and more about business. Because business isn't the same business it was five years ago. Businesses and the marketers within actually need the skill set that's resident within the so-called geek set, the very same people who were attending SXSW almost exclusively before the marketers discovered it.

It's all a marriage made in Austin as it were.

So a warning to attendees and marketers. Don't limit yourself only to the marketing focused content at SXSW. You never know what geekery in the panel room next door will become an integral component of your marketing program in a year or two. So keep your eyes open for the new and the different. Be open to things that may, at first, seem irrelevant.

If anything, SXSW is the one place you can go to get ahead of the curve on a one-to-one, first hand basis. Take advantage of it.

This SXSW coverage has been brought to you by Red Square, a small national agency that just happens to be located in the SXSE.